Looking over the wreckage, Mick’s eye found the burlap bag in the front yard, still sitting on the stump, dripping oil down the side. He winced.
“I guess we better tie a couple tarps over this mess the best we can, and then go face the music.”
* * *
Hap was standing out on Aubrey’s manicured lawn holding the burlap bag when the porch lights came on and Aubrey swung open his heavy mahogany-and-leaded-glass front door. The bag dangled from Hap’s fist and he held it a little away from him because it was dripping.
Mick faced Aubrey in the doorway, hands in pockets. Aubrey squinted past him at Hap, out there on the far edge of the light, but he couldn’t make out what Hap was holding.
“Aubrey, I, uh . . . we had a little accident with your chainsaw this afternoon,” Mick said.
Aubrey had apparently been eating dinner because he still had a light blue linen napkin tucked into the V of his white polo shirt. His eyes went from Hap to Mick and back, settling finally on the burlap bag. His brow furrowed and his mouth opened. Mick wasn’t absolutely sure, but he could have sworn Aubrey’s chin actually quivered. He pushed past Mick without a word and glided down the steps.
Hap held the bag up for him, solemnly. Aubrey reached out with both hands and took it by the neck. Holding it as far as he could from his tangerine pants, Aubrey laid it out gently on the lawn. Pinching the bottom corners of the burlap carefully, so as not to get oil on his fingers, he shook out the contents of the bag and stood there clinching his fists, staring at a pile of grimy twisted metal and shattered orange plastic.
A seasoned lumberjack would not have known it for a chainsaw. For a moment, just one brief instant, Aubrey seemed confused. He stood there not saying anything for a minute, just looking. He stared at the wreckage, then looked up at Mick and Hap.
“We didn’t even hardly use it,” Hap said. “It was a accident. Somethin’ went bad wrong.”
For a few seconds the look on Aubrey’s face hovered somewhere between curiosity, disbelief and rage. Mick started to tell him that of course he would replace the saw, but before he could get the words out, Hap, who had noticed Aubrey’s pant leg about to brush against a piece of oil-soaked scrap metal, pointed and said, in perfect sincerity, “Careful there, boss, you’re liable to soil them orange pants.”
Maybe it was the deadpan seriousness of Hap’s tone, or the look on Aubrey’s face, or perhaps the soiled orange pants was the last straw, the overbalancing mite that tipped the towering pile of little tragedies the day had brought to Mick and sent them all crashing down into the realm of the absurd. But whatever the cause, Mick lost it. He started laughing. He tried to stop, but then he looked at Aubrey and Hap and lost it again. Doubling over, bracing one hand against a giant white column and waving at Aubrey with the other, wheezing, he tried to regain his composure enough to at least talk, to try and apologize and tell Aubrey that he really meant no offense. But when he looked at their faces again, the laughter doubled. He crumpled. He sank down until he was sitting on the Italian tile at the top of the steps with his arms propped across his knees, his head down, tears dripping from his nose, shaking, shrieking with laughter.
Hap stood it as long as he could, but then his shoulders started to shake and he lost it, too.
Communication was impossible. While Mick and Hap had plenty to say but couldn’t say it, Aubrey was so angry he couldn’t find the words at all. His eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. He flung the burlap bag down at Hap’s feet and strode quickly up onto the Italian tile of his porch, stepping over Mick’s legs. He stood in the open door for a second, looking back at the two of them before he finally noticed the blue napkin hanging from his neck, snatched it off and held it in a shaking fist as he pointed at Mick.
His mouth opened to say something but he couldn’t make it come out. In the end he just slammed his front door in their faces and sealed himself behind the walls of his castle. The porch light went out, leaving the two of them cackling in the dark.
Mick eventually regained his composure and started to knock on the door again, but then he thought better of it. The way he had seen this little scene played out in his mind, they’d show Aubrey the remains of his saw, tell him the remarkable, once-in-a-lifetime story of what had happened to it, and by the time it was all over they would promise Aubrey a new chainsaw and they would all have gotten a good laugh out of it, including Aubrey. But nothing ever played out the way Mick saw it in his mind.
“We best just go,” Hap said. “Let him cool off. You can come back tomorrow and butter him up.”
* * *
It was a good thing Hap went home with Mick that night. Hap’s being there just may have saved Ben’s life, because in the South it is generally considered impolite to kill one of your children in front of a guest.
Layne was cooking supper when they trundled over the wheelbarrow with the stuff Hap had salvaged from his freezer. From the kitchen she heard them talking and loading stuff into the freezer in her garage, so she came out to see what was going on. She and the kids had left before the tree fell and got home after dark, so they didn’t know about Hap’s house—or the drowned truck. Mick left the storytelling to Hap, since it was his house and he seemed to really enjoy telling her the part about Aubrey’s chainsaw. Layne was spellbound, torn between laughing and crying while Hap told the story.
“But Hap!” she said, “Your house!”
“Aw, shoot,” he said with a wave, “I been wantin’ to remodel anyway.” That part was a lie—Hap didn’t even like the word remodel, let alone the task, but it did make a kind of sense. The house had been his wife’s domain. Small though it was, Hap’s ex-wife, Nadine, had supervised the building of it when they were young, and since then had chosen every scrap of carpet and paint, every cabinet and light fixture, every knickknack and picture frame in the cramped little four-room house. A born tyrant, she had run her house and husband like her own private fiefdom until five years ago, when she ran off with a house painter who, according to her, had more ambition than Hap—he owned his own business. After she left, there was no place Hap could look without seeing Nadine. It would never have occurred to him to destroy the house on purpose, but now that the deed was done he seemed relieved. Almost happy.
Layne fried a chicken for dinner, so while the oil was still hot she rolled Hap’s catfish in some cornmeal and fried them, too. It was during dinner that Ben almost got himself killed. When they sat down to eat, Layne asked about the catfish.
“They looked fresh,” she said. “Where’d you get fresh fish in the wintertime?”
“Out’n Mick’s truck,” Hap mumbled, his mouth full.
“Oh yeah,” Mick said. “Layne, I meant to tell you about the truck.” And then he told her the whole story, about how he came tearing down the hill toward Hampton Road and found out his brakes didn’t work.
She was just sitting there, kind of stunned, when Ben muttered, “Musta been the Legos.”
Mick’s antenna went up. “What Legos?”
“The ones on the brakes,” Ben said, cross-eyed, examining a chicken leg up close.
“Ben, what are you talking about?” Mick had a very bad feeling about this.
Ben looked up and noticed all of a sudden that all three grownups were staring hard at him and none of them were smiling.
“You told me to, Dad,” he said, the pitch of his voice rising a notch in self-defense.
“Huh? What are you talking about, Ben? Spit it out.”
“I fixed your brakes, Dad. You told me to go fix something. You did! You said the pedal made the lights stay on, so I thought maybe if I taped a stack of Legos to the back of the pedal with some of that black tape out of your toolbox . . .”
A stack of Legos would have kept the brake lights from coming on. They would also have kept the pedal from going all the way down.
Hap chuckled. “Yessir,” he nodded, “that’d do her.”
* * *
“You asleep?”
Layne st
irred, rolled over to face him. “No.”
It was late. Mick didn’t know the hour, but he’d been lying awake for a long time, staring at the dark star that was the ceiling fan, thinking. His knee still hurt when he walked, his shoulder was still a little sore from a rotatorcuff tweak he got falling off a column-form last year, his lower back ached sometimes, and there were a half-dozen minor scars and old wounds that nagged him when the weather turned cold. Maybe it was time to take a break from work, stay home for a month or two. It might not be so bad. He couldn’t even begin to untangle the economics of the situation but he knew he owed Hap big-time, and not just for the house. He also needed Hap to rebuild his drowned pickup truck. If he worked full time at it he figured he could have the house dried in before Christmas, and livable maybe a month after that. Maybe while they worked he and Hap could look after Dylan during the day and figure some kind of way to do this therapy that Layne wanted him to have.
“I changed my mind,” Mick said softly. “I guess I’ll stay home. For now.”
A whisper. “Okay.”
“For a while. I’ll try it, just for a while.”
“Sure.”
“An experiment, that’s all. Since I’m out of work anyway, I’ll give it a shot and see how it goes for a month or two. After Christmas, if it isn’t working out I’ll go look for a job then. All right?”
“All right.” Her voice came softly from the darkness, but Mick could hear her smiling. He felt like he was falling, like his whole life had been snatched from the top of a skyscraper.
7
* * *
Learning the trade.
A FEW years older than Layne, Mick was already a seasoned ironworker when he met her. She was in her junior year at the University of Georgia. At a movie theater one night he ran into a childhood friend who invited him to a Braves game the next week. Tip Turner’s dad was the CEO of one of the smaller airlines, and salesmen were always giving him seats right down behind the dugout on the first base line.
There were eight of them at the game that day—five guys and three girls. Most of them were people Tip knew from UGA, where he was a senior. Mick the Ironworker felt out of place, big-time. College had changed these kids somehow, and he couldn’t keep up. It wasn’t that they were sophisticated or anything—they were going to Georgia, after all—it’s just that the world they lived in every day was nothing like the one Mick lived in. They laughed, hard, at things he didn’t see, and sometimes they talked in a shorthand he just didn’t understand.
He ended up sitting between Tip and this girl. The girl came with the guy on the other side of her, a real clown with Harpo hair and a voice that was bigger than he was. He hollered at the batters constantly and his friends cracked up at everything he said. Some of it was even funny. When the left fielder made a spectacular diving catch to end a threat in the top of the third and then came up to bat first in the bottom of the inning, Harpo boomed out, “It was an okay catch, Zippy, but what have you done for us lately?” He really put on a show.
Mick had to force himself to concentrate on the game, not because it was a great game but because the girl sitting next to him was so strikingly pretty that it was hard to keep from sneaking glances at her. She was just a college girl in jeans and a blue sorority jersey, but she had heavy brown hair with traces of copper in it from the summer, and it rippled in the sun like liquid silk when she moved. She had deep green eyes, and when he looked into them it shook something in him that he didn’t know was there. He tried to keep his mind on the game and forget about her. She was with Harpo, and she was way out of Mick’s league anyway. He’d never thought of himself as ugly, but sitting next to her he was painfully aware of having inherited his old man’s hook nose.
Late in the game the left-handed slugger for the Reds came up with the bases loaded. With a 3–0 count he got fooled on a changeup, swung from his heels and launched his bat over the dugout, straight toward the girl, a hundred miles an hour and twirling like a helicopter blade.
Mick didn’t think about it—it was just a reflex. He lunged at the bat and somehow managed to stop it a foot in front of her face. The bat clattered down against the backs of the seats in front of them, and Harpo, who had ducked down behind the seats, ended up with it. He jumped up holding the bat aloft in his fists, hamming it up for the crowd. Half the stadium cheered.
But the girl. She was looking at Mick.
“Are you okay?” she said, just touching his shoulder.
“Oh yeah. It was nothing.” He didn’t tell her the little finger on his left hand was broken. Playing the hero. Anyway, it seemed like a small price to pay.
After the game, when everybody split up in the parking lot and they were walking away, she lagged behind her boyfriend a step, looked back, pulled that curtain of hair out of the way and flashed Mick a sideways smile that nearly buckled his knees. He knew right then he was seeing the rest of his life pass before his eyes, and he couldn’t wait to get started on it. A gift like that could make a man believe in God, or at least cause him to make all sorts of promises.
He got her number from Tip and spent a lot of time that fall traveling back and forth to Athens on the weekends. She eventually cut her hair, and over the years it had changed color a time or two, but she still had those deep green eyes. Sometimes, even now, she could still buckle his knees just by looking at him.
Their marriage was pretty much blue skies and gentle breezes for the first ten years—minor squalls, but no hurricanes. Neither of them ever doubted that they had married the right one. For the first year, Mick worked while Layne finished her degree. She was planning on getting a job when she graduated; the second income would help buy a piece of land and build a little house out in the country, but before she could even get her resume out they learned that Ben was on his way. Clarissa came the next year. Little Ben, whose mouth was only just starting to form words, christened his baby sister Toad, and it stuck. Mick got a kick out of it. Newborns had always looked like toads to him.
With two kids and one income money was always tight, and yet those were the best days of their lives, back when they were hanging by their fingernails, living from paycheck to paycheck. Layne planned on going to work as soon as the kids started school, but Dylan sprang himself on them when Toad was three. Mick was running a crew by then, and even with foreman’s pay things were tight.
When Dylan was six months old they finally put the kids in daycare and Layne went to work with a law firm doing their research and legwork. Daycare and taxes ate most of her check, but the remainder was enough to make payments on a little piece of land down in the country. Even then, they would have been stuck in a cramped apartment for several more years if Layne’s grandmother hadn’t died. Layne had always been Granny Ima’s favorite. When she died she left Layne her prized grand piano and enough money to pay off the land and make a down payment on a house. By doing the work himself, Mick saved enough money to put in a pool. Life was good.
But they were too busy. After a while they felt a little guilty about not being able to spend as much time with the kids, but that was life. Everybody was in the same shape. They were doing the best they could.
Now, suddenly and without warning, they were back down to one income, and it wasn’t even Mick’s. Their roles were reversed whether he liked it or not, and he didn’t. Like most men, Mick drew a large part of his self-image from what he did for a living. Money issues aside, he couldn’t help feeling that going from respected ironworker foreman to housewife was a major fall.
He had a very bad feeling about it.
* * *
Layne started educating him right away. Now that he was committed to staying home for a while she made sure Mick knew everything there was to know about sensory integration dysfunction in general and Dylan’s case in particular. It didn’t take him long to figure out that there were just too many variables—too many ways and combinations of ways that the disorder might or might not affect various inputs from his eyes and ears and f
ingers. Common sense told him the first thing to do was get to know Dylan a lot better. If he was going to build something he needed to know a little about the ground under it.
Then she started teaching him housework, which turned out to be even more complicated than Dylan’s problem. Mick was going to have to do it all, and she wanted to give him every last secret, every last trick of the trade discovered and passed down by a thousand generations of housewives. She showed him which cleanser to use on the toilet bowl—but not on the tub because it would dull the finish. She showed him how to get a spot out of the carpet. She taught him the intricacies of sweeping and mopping and dusting. She went through a dozen different soaps and waxes and polishes and told him which ones to use on furniture, on glass, or on a hardwood floor.
His eyes glazed over after a while. Most of this stuff was written right on the labels, and Mick knew he wouldn’t remember half of what she told him anyway. Make a guy read the whole encyclopedia and he’s not going to remember much of it. Mick knew the guy stuff—how to run a vacuum cleaner and wash dishes, how to cook a hamburger. He knew nothing about laundry and very little about cooking, but he did know that a man learns best by doing.
She went on forever about the clothes, all about laundry detergents and fabric softeners, how to work the washer and dryer. When she saw she was losing him she even wrote down a list of instructions on a piece of paper and taped it to the cabinet door above the washing machine. Hot water and bleach for the white stuff; most everything else warm, no bleach. Watch the labels for cold water wash.
He had quit listening by then, confident that he could figure it all out anyway. If he could erect a sixty-story highrise he could manage a little housework.
Summer of Light Page 7
